Saturday, September 26, 2009

Space - The Final Frontier

I took a break from the trapezoids today to start a new adventure. Recently, I joined an online group called the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge. The premise of this group is that on the last Friday of the month, a challenge would be issued. You are to work as quickly as you can (and that's relative!) to complete the challenge experimenting creatively along the way. There is no judging nor anybody looking over your shoulder. You don't have to do any challenge - you can take as long as you want and you don't have to follow the guildlines of the challenge if you don't want to. All in all - a very friendly but motivating group!

I've joined them in their fourth year which is themed around nature. This month's challenge is outer space . You also are encouraged to use some new embellishing or material that you might not usually use. Now, I'm not ashamed to say that I'm firmly in the fiber arts camp that less is more when it comes to embellishing. I realize that a lot of the market is pushing artists to buy all sorts of media and products to use in their art, but its honestly not for me. I have enough trouble trying to get good design using basic composition techniques without worrying about all that bling!

That said, I thought it was a perfect chance to try out the sampler set of Dye-Na-Flow paints, I bought last year but was too chicken to use. I gleaned inspiration from Hubble's Image site and off I went. Let me tell you, if you can't get inspired from those amazing pictures, then you might want to try another topic. Without much fanfare, I just got a nice piece of left over white fabric, taped it to my dyeing tablecloth, and wet it down. I just squeezed little drops from the bottles and used a brush to blend them all in. After they were the way I wanted them, I sprinkled sea salt on it. I have no idea if this is the way you are suppose to do it, but since I was exploring, I figured I could do it anyway I wanted. So far, I'm happy with the results and it was what I had in mind.

Now I'm just waiting for it to dry to compose the rest of the piece. Since its a rainy day in Northwestern PA, it might be a while. Still, its not as if I don't have any hand work to keep me busy. I did manage to get 30 pinwheels done this week. Just in case you're keeping track - that's 180 blades used! (as I tell my students - math - its everywhere!)